ttitude, delighting in details, and
proud of the clever brush which could carry imitation to the point of
deception. Rubens was the first to treat landscape in a bold
subjective way. He opened the book of Nature, so to speak, not to
spell out the words syllable by syllable, but to master her secret,
to descend into the depths of her soul, and then reflect what he
found there--in short, he fully understood the task of the landscape
painter. The fifty landscapes of his which we possess, contain the
whole scale from a state of idyllic repose to one of dramatic
excitement and tension. Take, for instance, the evening scene with
the rainbow in the Louvre, marvellous in its delicate gradations of
atmospheric tone, and the equally marvellous thunderstorm in the
Belvedere at Vienna, where a rain-cloud bursts under sulphur
lightning, and a mountain stream, swollen to a torrent and lashed by
the hurricane, carries all before it--trees, rocks, animals, and men.

In France, scarcely a flower had been seen in literature since the
Troubadour days, not even in the classical poetry of Corneille and
Racine. There were idyllic features in Fenelon's _Telemachus_, and
Ronsard borrowed motives from antiquity; but it was pastoral poetry
which blossomed luxuriantly here as in Italy and Spain.

Honore d'Urfe's famous _Astree_ was much translated; but both his
shepherds and his landscape were artificial, and the perfume of
courts and carpet knights was over the whole, with a certain trace of
sadness.

The case was different with French painting. After the Netherlands,
it was France, by her mediaeval illustrated manuscripts, who chiefly
aided in opening the world's eyes to landscape. Both the Poussins
penetrated below the surface of Nature. Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665)
painted serious stately subjects, such as a group of trees in the
foreground, a hill with a classic building in the middle, and a chain
of mountains in the distance, and laid more stress on drawing than
colour. There was greater life in the pictures of his brother-in-law,
Caspar Doughet, also called Poussin; his grass is more succulent, his
winds sigh in the trees, his storm bends the boughs and scatters the
clouds.

It was Claude Lorraine (1600-1682) who brought the ideal style to its
perfection. He inspired the very elements with mind and feeling; his
valleys, woods, and seas were just a veil through which divinity was
visible. All that was ugly, painful, and confused was pur